Ray Comfort
Ray Comfort (born December 5, 1949) is a New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist, he started Living Waters Publications and The Way of the Master in Bellflower, California, and has written a number of books. Personal life and conversion Born Jewish, Comfort was raised with next to no religious experience, having stated, "I went through life without any Christian instruction at all. I think I went to church about three times in about twenty years. I hated it. I found it an insult to my intellect." For many years, he served as an itinerant minister and associate pastor in his former hometown of Christchurch, teaching around New Zealand and Australia. In the 1970s, he began open-air preaching, which he has since done several thousand times. Around 1981–1982, he started using the principles of what he calls "Biblical Evangelism" (see below) after reading Charles Spurgeon and the New Testament books of Romans and Galatians. According to Comfort, he has designed dozens of gospel tracts since the 1970s, leading to the tract ministry of Living Waters currently selling millions of tracts each year. In 1989 , he accepted an offer from Hosanna Chapel (of the Calvary Chapel fellowship) in Bellflower, California, to begin full-time ministry in the United States. Currently, Comfort lives with his wife Sue in Southern California, and they have three adult children. He has also written many books and is a regular platform speaker at Southern Baptist state conferences. The Way of the Master ministry Origins and theology In late 2001 and early 2002, Comfort collaborated with actor Kirk Cameron to launch a ministry called The Way of the Master to teach Christians how to promote their faith "simply, effectively, Biblically ... the way Jesus did". Comfort and Cameron were also involved in rewriting some key scenes in the movie Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, which co-starred Cameron. He believes that evangelisation is the main reason that the Christian Church exists and that many of the evangelistic methods used by the church over the last century have produced more false conversions to Christianity than true ones. The key component Comfort uses is the "Moral Law of God" (The Ten Commandments) to speak about evidence of sin in the lives of his listeners before presenting the gospel of Christ to them. (See Biblical Evangelism for more details.) His realization of this method led to him in the mid-1980s to formulate two sermons entitled "Hell's Best Kept Secret" and "True and False Conversions." Comfort has no theological degree and has had no formal training. Ray Comfort believes there are millions of Roman Catholics and Protestants who have never been born again. They are Christian, he states, by profession but may have never found a place of Biblical repentance. He currently continues in itinerant ministry as a preacher and speaker at many churches and evangelism seminars, including Worldview Weekend events. Ray also preaches most Saturday afternoons at Huntington Beach, with a mechanical gorilla named Link, which helps him to draw a crowd and argue against evolution. As well as co-hosting Way of the Master Radio, now (Wretched Radio) he has been, together with Cameron, the co-host of The Way of the Master Television Show, now (Wretched TV) since December 2003. The show has aired two thirteen-episode seasons, and is currently filming the third season, expected to air in the Fall of 2008. Comfort, Ray Comfort, Ray Comfort, Ray Comfort, Ray